The housing crisis has stalled home building but apartment construction is undergoing a bit of a renaissance. There's now a huge pool of people forced to rent because they can't afford to buy a home, or they were a victim of foreclosure. In Denver, there aren't enough apartment vacancies.

According to the latest Census figures, the wealthiest Americans saw huge jumps in their income, while the rest had their incomes go down. For a deeper understanding of the wealth gap, Steve Inskeep talks to Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, and Matthew Yglesias, who writes about economics for the website Slate.com.

A federal judge nixed a $285 million settlement agreement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission involving a major financial case. U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff said the proposed agreement is "neither far, no reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest." Under the deal, Citi would have settled charges that it misled investors in mortgage debt prior to the collapse of the housing market. Rakoff has been a persistent critic of the SEC's oversight of Wall Street. Guy Raz talks to NPR's Jim Zarroli for more.

In the mid-'90s, the big banks set up the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, to track mortgages as they're traded by investors in mortgage-backed securities. It's a system set up to let banks skip the process of paying recurring filing fees at county courthouses each time a mortgage was bought or sold. Now, many cash-strapped local governments, big and small, are filing lawsuits against MERS. Politicians contend their communities are owed millions of dollars.

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